Money, and expertise plain and simple. 10 years ago no one knew *** they were doing, so you just re-engineerred the same crap over and over. Today you try and buy from someone else if you can, and focus on building the game, not the tech. When they started seriously into this project they were an edmonton developer with no mmo experience. So they set up shop in texas, and hired a bunch of people who'd made MMO's before. And the first thing they realized is starting a game engine from scratch is a pile of money. A game engine is not just graphics and physics. Those are the parts we tend to emphasize the most when teaching, because the other parts are covered elsewhere though. How do you build the back end? BioWare had no expertise in that (nor did LucasArts, the EA buyout came later), can you build a 'the client is the worldbuilder' game engine from scratch? Sure, I can (no, seriously, I can), but it's a huge undertaking and it would have added years to the process. How quickly can you prototype things? Assign tasks? Etc. You can see from the hero engine website what the licence agreement BioWare has. The 'normal' agremeent is simutronics takes 30% but runs the servers. Or for a undisclosed fee they'll hand you all the source code for everything and you can run your own servers. Right now the Data centres seem to be the same basic areas as Simutronics, but I'm betting EA went with the "we own everything" licence, because that's the only sensible one for a probject this size. But while they were developing they had access to multiple clusters they could work on, that someone else managed. They could start building content while they were figuring out all of the networking, rather than having to build them in serial. Back in 2006 when they were really strarting up this project, hero engine was Really good cutting edge stuff. Writing your own costs a lot of money and they had no expertise in any of the disrtibuted systems or networking architecture. Even the world building tools in hero engine are a step up from the aura engine (though I don't know about they lycium engine). The hero engines biggest problem is with collision detection. That's a fairly common problem for all CPU physics solvers (see havok), or they run pitifully slow. The goal with TOR wasn't to build the DA2 engine for the game. The PC mmo market can't handle that. You need to be able to run TOR with a computer that will run WoW. That necessarily equates to some serious compromises in what you could have done. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about things like voice chat, (hero engine supports vivox), and so on. They do the back end programmer stuff, you do the front end designer stuff. As a canadian game programmer I'm not exactly thrilled with BioWare setting up shop in a foreign country, but these things happen in this business, you go wherever you get the best tax breaks (austin, montreal, toronto, vancouver etc.).

If you've been through the content before, it's very, very quick. My first time through Korriban I spent about 8 hours (labour day beta). On live, I can do it in about 4. To see the same everything content. Secondly, the vast majority of the content is the same now as it was in beta, and it's the same for all characters. Dialogue only rarely has deep branches, and is mostly 3 choices, that converge to a point, 3 choices that converge to a point etc. It makes seeing all the choices very easy. If you don't care all that much what your companion thinks (especially if you use the same companion from the start and cap on rep). Third: if you've done it before, there's a certain amount of optimization you can do. The most basic thing is: Don't waste time. Walk forward, fly backward. What I mean is: Get a mount ASAP. If you are out wandering around doing quests, and you know where the next speeder point is, go unlock it, and then fly back to do quest turn ins. Try and do all the quests in one area at once. Skip all the heroic quests, and most of the bonus series. They don't add anything. They're a lot of work for nothing. Flashpoints, same thing. if you want to level fast doing a pvp daily and all the possible space combat missions that are green or above is usually worth it, but they don't add much story wise. If you read faster than the NPC's speak you can explore all the dialogue options, by reading and then go from there. All told, you can level in less than 100 hours. It took me 100 because I didn't get passed about 27 in beta, but I know a few people on my server who were in closed and did it in about 80, with help you could probably change things up, do heroics and flashpoints and skip non class quests and probably level faster than that. I don't consider pointlessly wandering back over the piece of land 'content'. If you accept that premise, and try and avoid that wherever possible, you cut down a lot of time to level. And again, it's really fast the second or 3rd time through.

Sports have rewards for objectives, not for how many people you beat up on the field. Right now the medal system seems more appropriate for ilum than for what are basically sports. So some things that aren't captured well by medals: Civil war and Void star: The goal here to to keep the other guy off objectives. not necessarily to kill him. Intercepting away from the door, so they can't shoot your people capping is good strategy for example. Huttball: Be where the ball is going to (or at should be), kill the ball carrier, or the ball carriers healers, then the ball carrier. Keep the ball carrier from the goal, if you can't kill him. And everywhere: interrupt. If I were to redesign the system, with some of the current mechanics: T he winning team gets points as though they had as many medals as the person on the losing team with the most medals (+1 for winning maybe_. This means there's no motivation to grind, or be ground on. If your team is, for whatever reason completely outmatched, just get it over with, quickly. It also means that if you're losing you can give up, but you know that if you win, you'll get more rewards so you fight like crazy to get whatever consolation prize you can. There would still be a base reward for completion and all that too. I grant that much of what you want is, in AI, a perceiving problem, and it's really hard to gather the right data efficiently, but right now the system encourages grinding, it should encourage winning. Oh, and lets have 2 more maps that are any faction, and try not to pair me against my friends. The more I think about it, the more I don't like the level 50 pvp bracket by itself. Maybe Level 50 + level 20 or 30 in pvp, but a level 50 with no pvp gear dies as fast as a level 49.

populations move in blobs. If there are only 17 people on balmora there might be 500 on 5 different instances of tatooine or the like. I can level to 17 in about 6 or 7 hours, I'm not criticizing if it took you longer than that, but keep that 'rate' in mind here. To 50 takes about 100 hours, if you've invested say 15, but you're on a server that was up on the 13th, or you just haven't had has many free hours as others you might be 'behind' (again 'behind' is only relevant in the context of zone populations, the game is fast enough to level that everyone will be 50 fairly quickly). Balmora is short, the point of balmora is to get you to nar shada, which is to get you to tatooine. Tatooine and alderaan slow you down a lot because there's a lot of large pointless space, they give you a mount so you can move 60% faster, but have 100% more distance to travel sort of thing. After that it tightens up a lot better and you go back to doing things rather than traveling to things (not that a lot of time isn't wasted traveling generally, but those two are particularly bad). If you want a gauge of your server pop check out the imperial fleet and see how many copies of the zone there are and how many people are in the instance you landed in.

Or they should just turn off expertise effects for us for the moment. This is a 'first week' problem, so you could just live with it a while until most everyone is level 50 in the next couple of weeks. Though I will point out the queues try and match 50's against 50's. For a while our server only had 4 level 50 imps, and if two of us queued separately we'd always end up on different teams, which would in an ideal world be self balancing. Though I don't care enough to grind warzone commendations the way the other 3 do. Even then, the warzone system rewards the wrong things, which encourages people grinding for gear to do things which help their personal score but do nothing to further the victory of the warzone (and they're generally worse off if a warzone is won quickly). So they have some work to do there.

Caveat: Expect to fail the mission. If you have proton torpedos and are shooting at say a destroyer shield generator your regular missiles will no longer fire. Sure, you can blow up the bridge, but you can't take out all 4 shield generators less you specifically hit each one. I guess it's possible, but I'd rather just use regular missiles. If you're having trouble you right click and hold and you get a red targeting circle that collapses and when you release the RMB it will fire (assuming it has locked on).

It looks like they automatically select themselves, try shooting 'missiles' at the bridge of a destroyer and they select themselves.